History on
trial: David Irving may be isolated in his high court
battle, but a growing number of respectable academics are
criticising what they have dubbed the 'Holocaust industry'.

David Cesarani on
the battle to control
the memory of the Shoah

AT times during his legal battle in the
high court, David Irving, a man of natural military
bearing, resembles a beleaguered Wehrmacht general in some
god-forsaken pocket on the eastern front, desperately trying
to beat off the Jewish-Bolshevik hordes. At least, one
suspects, that is rather how he sees it.

He stands or sits alone on one side of the courtroom,
while the large defence team occupies most of the rest of
it. In his opening statement he referred several times to
the existence of an 'international endeavour' to destroy his
name and career as a writer. He menacingly promised that
'the Jewish community, their fame and fortunes, play a
central role in these proceedings'.

Lest there be any doubt about that particular role, he
avers that he was 'the target of a hidden international
attempt' to silence him. Naming names, Irving has pointed
the finger at the American Jewish Anti-Defamation
League and its equivalents
in Britain, Canada, and Australia. Bizarre as they may
be, these accusations will resonate beyond the odd
collection of his supporters huddled in the Irving corner of
the public gallery.

To the young man clad in a black parka, black roll-top
sweater, black trousers and black baseball cap sitting among
them, the notion, no matter how paranoid, of an
international Jewish conspiracy to destroy a hero of the far
right will appear just so much common sense. Rather more
worryingly, it may feed into the growing backlash against
the so-called 'Holocaust industry' which, for very different
reasons, is taking hold in mainstream media and academic
circles.

Few reasonable people will dispute the right of Jews in
this country and elsewhere to join forces with other Jews,
as well as legions of non-Jewish anti-fascists, in opposing
neo-nazism and the Holocaust denial that is associated with
it. But some are questioning whether memorialisation of the
Holocaust, as well as Holocaust studies in schools and
universities, are not being used wrongly, or simply getting
out of hand.

While Irving disputes the
accepted facts of the Holocaust, posing as the victim of
powerful forces with a vested interest in the established
version, serious writers on both sides of the Atlantic
who scorn his methods and arguments are questioning the
purposes to which the Holocaust is being put. They are
asking if it deserves a special, protected place in the
public consciousness.

The government's announcement in October 2000 that it was
considering the establishment of a Holocaust Memorial Day in
the UK gave evidence both of the heightened intensity of
Holocaust awareness and the reaction to it. Richard
Ingrams in the Observer complained that 'not a day goes
by without the Holocaust being mentioned in one context or
another'.

Earlier in the year the announcement that the Imperial
War Museum North was planning a joint venture with the
Manchester Shoah Centre provoked Brian Sewell in the
Evening Standard to condemn the 'bandwagon' effect. 'Can we
not say to the Jews of Manchester,' he asked, 'that enough
has been made of their Holocaust and they are too greedy for
our memories.'

Most recently, Sam Schulman in the Spectator
warned that 'a new kind of anti-semitism may emerge in the
21st century, in reaction to the attempt to make 'the
Holocaust' central to our civilisation.' As with all such
journalistic provocations there is more than an element of
the self-fulfilling prophecy, but the critique is not
confined to columnists hungry for a topic that will trigger
an avalanche of letters to the editor.

In 2000, Tim Cole, a British academic responsible
for ground-breaking research on the wartime Budapest ghetto,
published Images of the Holocaust: the Myth of the 'Shoah
Business', which slammed the redemptive and kitschy
representation of the Holocaust seen in films and museums
the world over. He dubbed this, perhaps foolishly, the
'myth' of the Holocaust.

It is not hard to show that what we know as the
Holocaust, or Shoah, is a narrative that was constructed
over the years and only gained popular currency from the
late 60s onwards. Cole, building on the work of US scholar
James Young, argues that the Holocaust is invested with
different meanings depending on the society in which it is
recalled. As Young showed, it helps to tell a nation's story
through the Jewish experience.

But Cole singles out the use of exhibitions and memorials
to combat Holocaust denial. 'Museums such as the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum and movies such as Schindler's
List have as a self- conscious goal not simply teaching the
public lessons from the past, but also the aim of disproving
the claims of those who deny the Holocaust.'

In his eyes this is a mistake,
since 'it amounts to attempting to counter the
questioning of the reality of the 'Holocaust' by offering
in its place a representation of the 'Holocaust' which
only tends to blur the critical distinction between
reality and representation'. Worse, it's self-defeating:
'It was not until it emerged as an iconic event that it
was perceived to be an event which was deemed to be worth
denying.' Memorialisation provokes denial.

The intellectual backlash has been more prominent and
problematic in the US. Next month will see the publication
in Britain of The Holocaust In American Life by the
respected US historian Peter Novick, in which he
maintains that 'it was Jewish initiative that put the
Holocaust on the American agenda'. The story of Jewish
martyrdom was used by American Jewish leaders from the 70s
on to provide a narrative that could unite the diverse
American-Jewish community and deter assimilation, he argues.
It was also a handy way to clobber anti-semitism and justify
US support for Israel.

Novick uncovered many policy statements by leaders of the
American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and
the Anti-Defamation League to sustain his thesis. He was on
more speculative ground when it came to explaining the
receptivity of American society to a tale of Jewish misery
in Europe, although this was the most interesting part of
his argument.

The 60s saw the end of the melting-pot ethos in American
society and the rise of the 'new ethnicity'. It became
fashionable to be a hyphenated American. This
'particularism' enabled American-Jews, and specifically
Holocaust survivors, to tell their stories for the first
time. Moreover, their experience harmonised with America's
self-image as a sanctuary for history's victims. Victimhood
proved especially useful to American Jews who wanted to
defend their privileges against other ethnic groups, notably
African-Americans, without appearing too powerful or
greedy.

Americans accepted the prioritisation of the Holocaust
because it made them feel good: they stood shoulder to
shoulder with the people who had endured the worst of the
20th century. Remembering genocide in a 'warm glow of
virtue' became a vicarious alternative to actually doing
anything about it.

These arguments are echoed in a more reductive form by
Norman Finkelstein in his forthcoming book The
Holocaust Industry, which was prefigured by his hostile
review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing
Executioners in the New Left Review in mid-1997.
Finkelstein, a left-wing and anti-Zionist political
scientist, claims that the 'Holocaust industry' was created
by the pro-Israel lobby in the US after 1967 to justify aid
for Israel. "The Holocaust' is in effect the Zionist account
of the Nazi holocaust. It was seized upon and methodically
marketed because it was politically expedient.' It is at
this point that the backlash against the so-called Holocaust
industry collides disturbingly with the events in the high
court and their background.

On the far left throughout the 70s and 80s it was common
to find the argument that Jews cultivated knowledge of the
Holocaust to buttress Israel's right to exist at the expense
of the Palestinians and repel criticism of its occupation
policies. These themes lay at the heart of Jim
Allen's 1987 play Perdition, tellingly resurrected last
year. In this drama, based coincidentally on a libel trial,
the defence counsel argues that 'Israel is a paid watchdog:
a nation built on the pillar of Western guilt and subsidised
by American dollars.'

Similar reasoning was located on the far right. It found
expression in Irving's
introduction to the Leuchter Report, which purported to
show that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
According to Irving, 'Since 1949 the state of Israel has
received over DM90bn in voluntary reparations from West
Germany, essentially in atonement for the 'gas chambers of
Auschwitz", which he declared a 'myth'.

Of course, there is a world of difference between this
and the unease felt in many quarters about the prominence of
the Holocaust in society, culture and politics today. But in
their efforts to chart the origins of the 'Holocaust
industry', its critics fall into the trap of ascribing too
much influence and power to the Jews, while the motives they
ascribe to Jewish organisations are reductive and
harmful.

The Holocaust is the object of fascination today not just
because it is a gripping chapter of history, but because it
has stunning contemporary relevance. In a Europe that has
recently witnessed 'ethnic cleansing', the past has become
the present. As events in Rwanda showed, genocide is not
just a matter of academic research. The routine violation of
human rights and the benighted treatment of refugees
inevitably evoke past experiences and call for these to be
studied and, with respect for all the crucial variations of
scale and character, recalled as a warning.

For it is too easy to dismiss reference to the Holocaust
as an easy way of demarcating good and evil. The issues that
the Holocaust throws up, such as racism, eugenics and
biological politics, are precisely the dilemmas we face
today. It was for this reason that the British historian
Michael Burleigh concluded his study of Nazi
'euthanasia' policies, Death and Deliverance, with a
passionate discussion of what the Australian philosopher
Peter Singer currently says about the right to
life.

In the global marketplace of moral values, the Holocaust
seems one instance of applied evil that everyone can agree
about. The globalisation of media has made the Holocaust a
ubiquitous subject, not the other way round.

The struggle for compensation for slave and forced
labourers of the Nazi era would not have won such support
were it not, partly at least, for the inclination to hold
multinational corporations to account for their treatment of
employees. The ethical standards that are being demanded
from big business have given a reciprocal relevance to
conduct of business under the Third Reich. Such interest
hardly existed a few years ago.

Most importantly, the impatience with Holocaust
memorialisation rests on a continuing, stubborn resentment
of Jewish difference. Behind Peter Novick's criticism of
'particularism' is an assimilationist agenda. In
Finkelstein's anti-Zionism this is quite explicit. The
critics of the proposed Holocaust Memorial Day who instead
want a 'genocide day' seem unable, or unwilling, to
comprehend the specificity of the Jewish fate in the 20th
century and the right of a people to commemorate its
suffering after decades when it was all but ignored by the
world.

Jews are still living with the pain of that silence. It
was not of their making or choosing. The ways of
commemorating the Holocaust that may make amends for that
silencing process are legitimate subjects for argument, but
there is a danger of an inadvertent coalition between the
man who sees himself as the victim of a 'hidden
international conspiracy' and the critics of the 'Holocaust
industry' who depict it as a manipulative ramp for the
benefit of one ethnic interest group and the State of
Israel.

David Cesarani is professor of
modern Jewish history at Southampton university and is
writing a book on the impact of the Holocaust.